The film
ends after the Romans finally expel the Jews from Jerusalem, and thus some of them migrate to
Russian territory.

That is the
introduction to the new $50 million museum that seeks to tell the oft-supressed
history of the Jews in Russia,
which once numbered at about 5 million but are now officially at 150,000,
though the number may be higher.

The rest of
the museum is of a much more serious tone than the Disney World-like
introduction, but equally high-tech.

Touch
screens show the stories of famous Russian Jews throughout the centuries. A
short film about the Holocaust has chilling surround sound.

If
expensive technology is needed to tell the history of the Jews in Russia, so be
it. This is serious history that deserves attention.

Related:

Many famous
Russians, were in fact Jewish, even if they did not identify as such. Leon
Trotsky - a brilliant but cruel revolutionary - was Jewish and propagandized
as one, even though he called himself an internationalist and declined to help
out the Jews as the Whites carried out pogroms during the Russian Civil War. The
singer Vladimir Vysotsky was Jewish too - perhaps contributing to his outsider
appeal - but had wide popular appeal under the Soviet
Union.

Lenin was
later found to have Jewish roots too, but Stalinist anti-Semitism suppressed
this fact. This angle isn't explored at the museum, but a recent exhibition
explored declassified KGB files. Stalin, the main instigator behind official
Soviet anti-Semitism, is portrayed as such.

The museum
devotes a great deal of attention on World War II - or as it is called in
Russian, the Great Patriotic War. The main film tells a fundamentally Soviet
story of the war - Operation Barbarossa, Stalingrad,
the Siege of Leningrad and the Fall of Berlin - as narrated by survivors from
the war whom are ostensibly Jewish.

The museum
also devotes significant attention the Holocaust. As Timothy Snyder wrote in
his excellent history of mass killings in Eastern Europe under Hitler and
Stalin, "Bloodlands," concentration camps in the East killed more yet
are less-remembered than places like Auschwitz because of the grim fact that
there were far fewer - if any - survivors. The museum, doing a significant
service, remembers the Jews killed under Soviet territory.

Famous
refuseniks, Natan Scharansky and Iosif Begin, narrate their stories of trying
to emigrate to Israel,
only after being imprisoned for years.

The museum
ends at perestroika, with Russian Jews - many of whom have left for Israel or the U.S. - saying what the era meant
to them.

Therein
lies a contradiction, which the museum hopes to push back against, is that many
Russian Jews have left the country because of anti-Semitism and have no
intention to return.

Russia, like Israel, has its own Law of Return. President
Vladimir Putin donated a month's salary of $5,600 to the museum. He has has
encouraged Jews to come back, and an estimated 100,000 have taken him up on the
offer.

Billionaire
Viktor Vekselberg, who like many of Russia's oligarchs, is Jewish, also
helped bankroll the project. Unlike many of the oligarchs who emerged in the
1990s, he hasn't fled the country and is an ally to Putin.

The museum
ends with a series of large photographs of ordinary Jews living in Moscow photographed
against a white background without any pose. The message is clear - Jews are a
part of Russia.